Sunak vs Starmer: will TV debates help or hinder the 2024 general election?

In a sign this will be at least as acrimonious as any previous election, Keir Starmer’s rejection of Rishi Sunak’s challenge of six television debates has been described by Tory chair Richard Holden as “chickening out” (even though the Labour leader has offered two, one each on the BBC and ITV).

Labour says it “won’t be tearing up the format established in previous elections just to suit this week’s whims of the Tory party”. However, that’s a little disingenuous because there never has been an established format (quite the opposite, and Sky News has usually had a share of the action). The Euros football tournament will also consume a significant amount of broadcasting time. For all concerned, television debates can be a mixed blessing...

Probably. For its first few hundred years, British democracy managed without such quasi-presidential debates, and they’ve only become a habit since 2010. There seems to be something in them for both major parties; smaller parties are yet to fight for a place in the limelight, which can complicate arrangements.

Their weekly clashes at Prime Minister’s Questions suggest a Sunak-Starmer debate might be predictable and, frankly, a bit dull. Both could emerge as equally underwhelming losers, as happened in the two 2019 debates between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, at which the only real excitement was when Corbyn revealed a “secret dossier” suggesting the Tories wanted to sell the NHS to American interests.

Anything where the two principal leaders do not go directly head-to-head; Q&A formats, separate but successive interviews, multi-leader debates, none of these really count. In fact, while the years since 2010 have produced a variety of these events, including Brexit debates and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, classic two-handers have seldom been seen.

They might refuse if they calculate there is a big risk, but they are more willing to participate if they think they have nothing to lose – as Sunak may well calculate now.

This reasoning has been put pithily by John Major, who rejected a challenge from Labour leader Neil Kinnock in 1992 but then energetically argued for a head-to-head with Tony Blair in 1997: “Every party politician that expects to lose tries that trick of debates and every politician who expects to win says no.” Still, Theresa May was the only incumbent since Tony Blair to completely avoid such a challenge; she sent Amber Rudd along as her stand-in, which did nothing for her rapidly shrinking authority.

There are two main devices: the first is to declare loftily that television debates are inappropriately “presidential” and gimmicky in our parliamentary system. This was the excuse made by Alec Douglas-Home over the first proposal for a TV event in 1964, inspired by the Kennedy-Nixon bouts of 1960. The then Labour leader, Harold Wilson, was the first British politician to master television, whereas Douglas-Home was an uncertain performer with an untelegenic skeletal appearance.

The constitutional excuse can be supplemented by more or less spurious conditions, including insistence on minor party participation. Blair in 1997 got out of taking on Major by insisting Paddy Ashdown of the Lib Dems was there, which he knew wasn’t acceptable to the Conservatives. In 2015, David Cameron, who had been all too keen to debate Gordon Brown in 2010, minimised his exposure to debates by insisting the Greens and the DUP be given equal status; he ended up in one seven-way debate with Ed Miliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat), Nigel Farage (Ukip), Nicola Sturgeon (SNP), Natalie Bennett (Greens) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru). The format meant none of them really had an opportunity to say much.

Another way to avoid awkward questions is indeed simply not to turn up when invited, but this creates the hazard of the “empty chair” which makes the absentee look cowardly. Boris Johnson’s failure to attend a 2019 Channel 4 debate on the environment tuned into a farce – which may have been the intention – when he dispatched his father, Stanley, and Michael  Gove to the studios to try and argue their way onto the stage. They were unsuccessful, and the debate producers replaced Johnson with a symbolic block of ice that melted under the hot lights… a visual metaphor for global warming.

Experts are divided, but when the public is especially angry at politics, “outsiders” usually gain an advantage. The series of shows in 2010 featuring Brown, Cameron and Clegg really boosted the Liberal Democrat leader’s profile and gave rise to the catchphrase “I agree with Nick” and the (very) brief phenomenon of Cleggmania. In the multi-party debates in 2015, Sturgeon and Farage came top in viewers’ polls of who had performed best. Damage can also be done; most famously, Ed Miliband’s remark “hell yes, I’m tough enough”, delivered with full nerdy force, launched a thousand unhelpful memes.

They can increase voter engagement and, less reliably, entertainment. The gladiatorial spectacle for high stakes holds much promise, perhaps less so in the case of Starmer vs Sunak.

One powerful lesson from three 2010 debates was that debates can suck the life out of the campaigns. As Cameron later reflected: “The press and all of us were interested in the runup to the debate, the debate and the post-debate analysis, not the rest of the campaign, which I really enjoy.” Another good reason for Starmer to minimise his exposure to this particular format.